Just because there already is one, that does not mean that there cannot be another one. We are in the midst of the biggest constitutional transition since the one that produced the last Bill of Rights. Bigger than that, in fact.
A new Bill of Rights, within a new Treaty of Union.
To which, interestingly, Northern Ireland, as such, would be a party. Well, it (or, in that case, she) is older than most of the states in the world today. At some point, reality has to be faced.
Reality has to be faced with regard to the emergence of a de facto state in the Gaza Strip, the ancient Jews of which, always a minority, owed no small part of their prosperity to not having to pay tithes to Jerusalem or leave the land fallow every seventh year, since the Rabbinical view was that they were not living in the Land of Israel.
It is mind-boggling that there is now no seaport, or indeed airport, at what was once so important a maritime centre that at least 16 conquering Pharaohs resided there at some point, in order to secure control of it.
But in the post-War period, neither Israel not Egypt wanted the place, so it became the only distinct entity on earth with Palestinians as the entire permanent population. They had nowhere else to go, so they went there, which has thus become something distinct. That is reality. At some point, reality has to be faced.
Reality had to be faced over the Chinese seat at the UN, and it may yet have to be faced over Taiwan, which would have to renounce any claim to jurisdiction over China as she now existed.
Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese Government to resolve territorial disputes, Taiwan also lays claim to all of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Burma.
There is no realism there. Therefore, there can be no recognition.
As for Hong Kong, the likes of Martin Jacques, a progenitor of New Labour in the pages of Marxism Today, had no time whatever for China in those days. It is as the standard-bearer of utterly uncompromising capitalism that she can now do know wrong in the eyes of the Blairites avant la lettre.
There are strikes, often violent ones, all the time in China, because she is now characterised by unbridled capitalism, so there are bound to be.
In Hong Kong, one of Britain's most remarkable monuments around the world, they want their capitalism tempered by democratic institutions in the service of the kind of interests that have now brought the unionised workers out on strike in support of the demonstrating students.
Oh, yes. A British monument on the other side of the world, all right.
The things achieved, including those lost since the 1979 Revolution with which Jacques and his cabal urged the Labour Movement, of which they themselves were not really part, to make peace, need to be written into a new British Bill of Rights within a new Treaty of Union.
That those would not repeal or supersede the old ones, and would leave or restore the business of implementation to the Parliament that delivered all those social democratic goods in the first place, would be the most British things of all about them. Though also, in their way, rather Confucian.
Reality has to be faced with regard to the emergence of a de facto state in the Gaza Strip, the ancient Jews of which, always a minority, owed no small part of their prosperity to not having to pay tithes to Jerusalem or leave the land fallow every seventh year, since the Rabbinical view was that they were not living in the Land of Israel.
It is mind-boggling that there is now no seaport, or indeed airport, at what was once so important a maritime centre that at least 16 conquering Pharaohs resided there at some point, in order to secure control of it.
But in the post-War period, neither Israel not Egypt wanted the place, so it became the only distinct entity on earth with Palestinians as the entire permanent population. They had nowhere else to go, so they went there, which has thus become something distinct. That is reality. At some point, reality has to be faced.
Reality had to be faced over the Chinese seat at the UN, and it may yet have to be faced over Taiwan, which would have to renounce any claim to jurisdiction over China as she now existed.
Rejecting the authority of the present Chinese Government to resolve territorial disputes, Taiwan also lays claim to all of Mongolia, as well as to parts of Russia, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bhutan and Burma.
There is no realism there. Therefore, there can be no recognition.
As for Hong Kong, the likes of Martin Jacques, a progenitor of New Labour in the pages of Marxism Today, had no time whatever for China in those days. It is as the standard-bearer of utterly uncompromising capitalism that she can now do know wrong in the eyes of the Blairites avant la lettre.
There are strikes, often violent ones, all the time in China, because she is now characterised by unbridled capitalism, so there are bound to be.
In Hong Kong, one of Britain's most remarkable monuments around the world, they want their capitalism tempered by democratic institutions in the service of the kind of interests that have now brought the unionised workers out on strike in support of the demonstrating students.
Oh, yes. A British monument on the other side of the world, all right.
The things achieved, including those lost since the 1979 Revolution with which Jacques and his cabal urged the Labour Movement, of which they themselves were not really part, to make peace, need to be written into a new British Bill of Rights within a new Treaty of Union.
That those would not repeal or supersede the old ones, and would leave or restore the business of implementation to the Parliament that delivered all those social democratic goods in the first place, would be the most British things of all about them. Though also, in their way, rather Confucian.
A Bill of Rights is attractive but, as with the Lib Dem proposal for a codified constitution, it falls at the hurdle of the United Kingdom not having higher entrenched law, unless the House of Commons decides to introduce it. Another aspect of the whole debate over the Human Rights Act of 1998 I was amazed to hear on R4 Question time the apparent ignorance over what it actually is. It allows appeals brought under the European Convention of Human Rights to be heard by British judges in the UK rather than, as between 1967-2000 at Strasbourg. So repealing the act will not take us out of the jurisdiction of the ECHR unless we withdraw from that too. Chucking the Baby out with the bath water! Seems more like the Tories trying to win over the UKIP/Daily Mail reader, like May's illiberal proposals on banging up this who fly close the the legal wind on extremist views. Nice to wipe the smirk of Anjem Choudry's face but not enough to encroach on our own rights and what our liberal-democracy is supposed to stand for.
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